


One Thousand Paper Cranes

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Primeval
Genre: M/M, Returning Home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 16:28:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17563997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: If Lester just wishes hard enough, Ryan will make it back.





	One Thousand Paper Cranes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eriah211](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eriah211/gifts).



The first thing Ryan noticed (once he had showered, cleaned up, debriefed, demolished a pot of coffee, devastated breakfast, kissed half the life out of James, and reassured his colleagues that he wasn't a hallucination) was that there were paper cranes everywhere. Paper cranes on desks. Paper cranes blu-tacked to the anomaly detector. Paper cranes lined up on windowsills, paper cranes perched on the top of the whiteboard in the rec room. They seemed to be made of every conceivable material, from leftover Christmas wrapping paper to scraps of legal pad and reused printer paper, fragments of Health and Safety paperwork vanishing beneath triangular wings.

"Where the hell are these from?" he asked James, picking one up and turning it over in his hand. "You used to turn your nose up at any kind of office decoration."

Lester, looking incredibly shifty, changed the subject.

Enlightenment came when they made it home, and Ryan found Lester's flat even more thoroughly festooned in paper cranes. The Christmas decorations, if he knew his partner at all, would have come down on the sixth of January prompt, but whether these had formed part of a Christmas decorative scheme or not they had been allowed to remain. Strings of them were tacked onto the walls, serried ranks lined up on bookshelves, as small as a thumbnail or as large as Lester's entire palm, in a not dissimilar mix of materials to those Ryan had seen in the office, except that now newspaper sheets, junk mail, Lester's good writing paper and what looked like a note home from one of the kids' schools had been pressed into service.

Ryan tried to line up something sensible to say about this.

"They're meant to be good luck," Lester said quietly, before Ryan could open his mouth. "If you can make a thousand, then a wish will be granted to you. Allegedly."

All Ryan's rough draft sentences fled his brain.

"How many did you make?"

"Nine hundred and ninety eight. And a half." Lester gestured apologetically at the breakfast bar and sink. A coffee-pot was upside down on the drainage rack, and the broken pieces of a mug had been collected onto newspaper, probably by Lester's teenaged daughter when she got home from school, but she hadn’t touched the half-made paper crane. She'd also been tactful enough to go to a friend's, or her girlfriend's, for the evening. "I was most of the way through when Jenny called."

"Rounding error," Ryan said, trying not to choke on a large number of feelings he was having trouble naming. "Maybe sometimes you have to make a thousand and two."

"Quite," Lester said. "I expect it averages out."

When Ryan hugged him Lester was thinner than he remembered, and he clung more tightly. But his melodramatic complaints were just the same, and that made Ryan laugh.


End file.
